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CHAPTER IV. THE FORERUNNERS (1865-1898) Iron and steel-hulled ships were not new to the Great Lakes even in 1864. The United States Government built three vessels of iron in 1843; a revenue cutter at Oswego, the survey steamer Colonel Abert at Buffalo, and the famous gunboat, Michigan, the first iron-hulled vessel in the United States Navy, at Erie. In 1862, the first iron-hulled propeller, Merchant, was built at Buffalo. The Canadians had a few iron-hulled sidewheelers running in the St. Lawrence River region in the 1840's and 1850's. The first steel-hulled vessel built in Northern Ohio shipyards appears to have been the steam yacht Octavia, in 1864. She was built by Peck and Masters, in Cleveland, for T. W. Kennard of the Atlantic and Great Western Railroad. She was 500 tons burthen, forty-four feet long, twenty-five feet wide, and fourteen feet in draft. At the end of the 1864 season she was to be taken to New York preparatory for a trip to England the following year, but whether she went is unknown.1 On July 25, 1868, James Blaisdell launched the iron passenger steamer J. K. White. She was only eighty-one feet long, and ran between Cleveland and Rocky River, later moving to Fairport, where she ran from that town to Painesville. The Octavia and the White were perhaps the only iron or steel vessels built prior to 1882 in Ohio lake ports. The remainder of the steel shipbuilding story is one largely of incorporation, merger, and big business. The building of a steel ship and the equipment and facilities needed in its construction are costly. The skills required to transform a set of blueprints into a finished ship are such that the skilled artisan of the wooden shipbuilding era was replaced by the trained marine engineer and designer. Steel vessels were built in three Ohio lake ports prior to the turn of the century - Toledo, Lorain, and Cleveland - with the latter far ahead of the others as the center of the industry. The idea of building a steel vessel in Cleveland appeared in print as early as 1872: 91